The Last to See Me (The Last Ghost #1) - M Dressler Page 0,12

Albion Street. I did the laundry, and cooked, and swept, and everything else, because what choice does a soul have but to keep moving if she wants to get by? Yet a soul can crave rest, too, just like any tern on the cliffs. Only a soul that’s finished doesn’t flutter and fight. Only a soul that’s dead takes no flight. Can’t you see, Mr. Pratt? Why would you fault the will to move?

5

Upstairs now,” he announces.

On the first landing I let them pass in a row underneath me.

“Beautiful staircase. And rosette around the chandelier,” Pratt says.

Ellen takes him to the north bedrooms first, where the Lambry daughters used to brush their long hair with ivory combs, then across to the boys’ rooms, their paper kites and nautical telescopes and boxes of games long gone. And then to the room poor Alice died in.

Pratt touches her satin-covered bed, looks under the old-fashioned canopy.

“The heirs left all her things in the house,” he notices. “Why?”

“They haven’t gotten around to doing anything about them yet. I don’t think they knew Alice or cared much about this place, anymore. We offered to empty the house and stage it, but they said to leave everything because it added character. And in case buyers wanted any of it.”

He brushes his fingers across her marble-topped nightstands, then touches his chest again.

Ellen watches. “Anything?”

“Anger here. Although nothing unusual. People suddenly passing out of life generally don’t go without some pain or anguish. She died right here.” He points to the floor next to the bed.

He’s right. How did he know that?

“How did you know that?” Ellen asks.

He doesn’t answer. “Is this Alice? On the nightstand?”

A photo of her when she was young, with a fan in her hand and her long, thin hair streaming at her side.

“I think so.”

“Is it very like her?”

“I don’t know. We never met. She looks like a character, doesn’t she?”

It was one of Alice’s favorite games, all her life, to dress up in Chinese robes with coiling dragons all over them and walk around the house in embroidered slippers and pretend she was someone else.

“She spent a lot of time in her studio.” Ellen leads Pratt on. “It’s the next room, here.”

Her work tables and easels stand under the high gable. All of it bare now, though she used to spread out her sheets of watercolor paper everywhere and shuffle through her bottles and tins and poke a long brush into an oval of paint like an eye she was gouging out.

Ellen stops at the windowsill. “You can see she got good light in here. And also that she liked to collect dead things. Sand dollars and starfish and sea glass. Do they mean anything, you think?”

“Maybe, if there were some charge around them. But there isn’t any.”

They pass through what was once the governess’s alcove, then reach the small, brass-hinged door that leads to the spiral staircase and up to the timbered tower that old Mrs. Lambry had blacksmithed and fitted with the widow’s walk. She wanted it, she told the workmen, to be higher than St. Clements Church, and as lofty as her grief. And the steps, those had to be metal, iron and hollow. When she stepped on each one, it must ring like a bell.

Pratt and Ellen rise, going round and round, their shoes pounding and ringing with each step, until they find the smaller door at the top and open it and come out into the air and sun and the fog burning away and a view of the village in all directions.

Pratt steps out and grips the iron railing. He stares down to the back lawn, where Mrs. Broyle used to have the rugs brought out for beating. And then, at the edge of Lambry’s Acre, where the lawn meets the headland before it tumbles down to the sea, he sees the house’s sagging water tower.

“That’s original, too,” Ellen tells him, holding the railing with both hands. “It’s in bad shape and needs to be torn down or re-purposed. Thing is, to take anything down in Benito you have to go through code reviews and inspections, and Alice didn’t want to do that, and now the heirs don’t want to do that, so it’s just sitting there, basically an eyesore. The tank is empty. Everyone’s on town water now.”

“If the tank is empty, I’ll want to get in it.”

“No, I don’t think so, Mr. Pratt. It’s in terrible shape. See where some of the planks are